The brown-headed cowbird is nothing short of a nightmare for its hosts: If they eject the brood parasite's eggs from the nest, it punishes them by destroying their entire clutch. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute ...

North Americans might be seeing new species of birds in certain areas of the continent in the near future. According to research conducted by a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his co-authors, ...

Brown-headed cowbirds have a reputation for being deadbeat parents: They lay their eggs in other birds' nests and then disappear, the story goes, leaving the care and feeding of their offspring to an unwitting foster family. ...

Brood parasites are reproductive cheats that evolve ways of duping other birds into raising their young. Examples such as mimicry of host eggs, chicks and fledglings by brood parasitic eggs, chicks and fledglings are amongst ...

Old-school field work meets cutting-edge technology! For decades, researchers have been making artificial eggs out of plaster, wood, and other materials to test how birds identify and reject the eggs that invading "brood ...

Species must reproduce to survive, and animals have found unique ways of achieving this. For some, including us, it seems as though producing a few offspring that require extended care is the best strategy. For others, such ...

Cuckoos aren't the kind of parents you'd want. They never raise their young ones, leaving that job to other birds. They achieve this by laying their eggs in other expectant birds' nests, who treat them as their own and take ...

If a restaurant owner fails to pay the protection money demanded of him, he can expect his premises to be trashed. Warnings like these are seldom required, however, as fear of the consequences is enough to make restaurant ...

Tired jokes about men, women and sense of direction have existed since the dawn of time. A new study at Western, however, has shown female brown-headed cowbirds perform spatial tasks better than their male counterparts – ...

(Phys.org) —New research has solved a mystery as to why some birds choose not to reproduce, and instead help to guard the nests of their close relatives. This occurs in about nine percent of all bird species.